


last cigarette

by friedgalaxies



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Introspection, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25232752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friedgalaxies/pseuds/friedgalaxies
Summary: he’s on his last cigarette, and she’s smiling like she knows something.
Relationships: Nara Shikamaru/Temari
Comments: 4
Kudos: 47





	last cigarette

She finds him smoking his last cigarette. 

These days, Shikamaru tries not to run out of cigarettes, but with the amount of things he has on his plate he’s lucky he remembers his own head when he’s walking out the door— or so Ino says. She’s had to run him down waving his own wallet in her hand enough times to know. 

So she finds him smoking his last cigarette sitting on the steps outside the Hokage building, where he’s just had a meeting with Lady Tsunade over the state of the Nara territories and how that conflicts with the natural deer population and the gigantic index of all the medicines the Nara clan has access to and can she get him some more powdered deer horn, enough to staff the hospital building for a few weeks and— 

He’s halfway through his last cigarette when he notices her standing there, fiddling with the hem of her sleeves like a nervous kid, though as long as he’s known her she’s never been the type to fidget like that. 

Frankly, he hasn’t seen her in a long time, either, with how busy the two of them have been. Being advisor and bodyguard to the Kazekage never gets to be an easier job, even years after Gaara’s appointment (and how weird it is to think that the kid that once committed brutal, grievous bodily harm against his friends and killed countless candidates in that year’s chuunin exams is the Kazekage now and was appointed to the position back when he was still a lanky, sweaty-palmed teenager—.) He hasn’t seen her in, what, months, maybe? Frankly, all the days since Asuma’s death have all run together into one blurry streak of depression-toned watercolor with the smell of nicotine and tears and Shikamaru’s finding it hard to find space in his brain for things that aren’t relegated solely to keeping his loved ones alive and healthy. 

Frankly, Shikamaru’s finding it hard to find space in his brain to care for himself or the fact that he’s still alive, of all things, which is probably why he’s sitting on the steps of the Hokage building smoking his last cigarette. 

Temari has always been beautiful, in an angry kind of way, like the way a sandstorm or a tsunami is beautiful. In the way a deadly force of nature is beautiful, with her calloused hands Shikamaru has spent way too much time thinking would look nice wrapped around his own, and her round, bold, desert-dark features that are always either in an expression of haughty delight or displeased frustration bordering quickly on anger. Temari has always been beautiful, and she’s still beautiful, even harried with dark circles the width of his thin fingers under her eyes and flyaways coming out of her sunset colored bantu knots. She’s beautiful even with blood on her hands and dirt on her face and a broken nose, but Shikamaru isn’t gonna tell her that, not when she’s looking so displeased with him already and he hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s done wrong this time. 

“Since when do you smoke?” she says, and he’s caught momentarily off guard, because he would’ve thought the stink of nicotine and depression follows him around the village like a dog these days and she would’ve picked it up before now, dutifully dogging Gaara’s steps like the loyal attack dog she is (even though they both know he’s perfectly capable of defending himself on his own.) 

He looks down at the cigarette in his hand, his last one, and balanced between first two fingers and thumb like how his pen rests against the prominent writer’s callous on his left middle finger when he’s taking a rare break from writing up mission reports. His hands ache, these days, and he isn’t looking forward to the kind of ache that’ll be in them when he makes it to thirty— if he makes it to thirty, that is. 

He suddenly thinks of Asuma, and the tears in the back of his throat are almost as bitter as the taste of a last cigarette. Almost. 

“Picked it up recently.” he shrugs, looking to his side on the long, low steps as if indicating her to sit, though he’s pretty sure she’s barely got enough time to breathe on her own these days and hasn’t got time for silly things like sitting down and having a conversation with the local burnt-out Nara genius on the steps of the Hokage building while he smokes his last cigarette. 

Temari shrugs back and sits down next to him, and look at that, surprises abound, these days. Her eyes are wide and tired and has she always had that little beauty mark under her nose, just to the left? Her eyes are wide and dark and tired and she looks out at the canopies with something between disdain and longing, though Shikamaru isn’t sure she’d even tell him which it is if he asked. She’s closed off like that, but he kinda likes it. She’s the most complex puzzle he’s ever had to solve, and it’s fun. 

Ino gets after him for stringing along pretty girls he has no interest in, with all his disdainful looks and barely acquiesced conversations, the way he accepts chocolates on Valentine’s day only with no intention of returning the favor on White Day. But frankly, it’s not his fault those girls find him attractive! He’s not sure why they do in the first place, honestly, with the way he stinks of nicotine and frazzled nerves like burning wires in an overly complex electrical system that’s due to come crashing down around his ears at any moment but miraculously doesn’t, somehow. 

He’s halfway through his last cigarette and she’s looking at him like she wants something, but he’s too tired to figure out what it might be so for once he’s just hoping she’ll say it outright instead of making him play mind games. 

“Where’s the Kazekage?” he says instead, because even if he’s known him since he was a snot nosed little homicidal brat he still has to keep up with formal titles, if only so he stays in Lady Tsunade’s good books. Temari stretches her legs out in front of her, long, thin layers of lightly colored fabrics falling away at her ankles and exposing the worn sandals underneath. 

“Having dinner with Rock Lee. They get along like heat in Death Valley, y’know?” 

Shikamaru snorts, but more at the way she’s adapted the metaphor in her own Suna flavor than the fact that the Beautiful Blue Beast of Konoha has a puppy dog crush on the Kazekage. Anyone with half a brain would’ve seen it coming, which is why those two are still dancing around each other even now. Though, he supposes, crushing a guy’s arm and leg to a fine powder and nearly ending his career as a shinobi is enough to make one have reservations about pursuing him romantically, even if Lee all too obviously returns the feelings Gaara is keeping bundled up in his chest like his demon. 

“It’s, ‘like a house on fire’.” he says instead. She flicks him in the forehead. 

“Houses in Suna don’t catch on fire, idiot. Stone doesn’t burn.” she says in return, but there’s a kind of easy grin on her face that says she’s kidding and she’s not actually gonna whap him across the head with the broad end of her fan for their cultural differences. 

Instead, she steals his last cigarette and takes a long pull off of it, holding the smoke in her lungs a minute before exhaling. She deposits the cigarette back in his hand, and he’s too distracted by the fact that she apparently smokes to get caught up in the brush of her thick desert calluses against the pads of his fingers. 

He cocks an eyebrow, in a way that he’s been told is specifically Nara. “I thought you didn’t smoke.” 

“I don’t.” she says, and a few stray whisps of smoke catch around her canines in pleased curls, filtering through the edges of her smile. 

“But you just—“ 

“If anyone asks, I don’t smoke.” She borrows the Nara eyebrow and mirrors it right back at him. “Though I guess subtlety isn’t your speciality here, genius. Anyone could smell your stench from a mile anyway with the way you burn through those.” 

He’s too distracted by the words coming out of her mouth and the way her lips have left the ghost of their imprints on his last cigarette to notice it’s almost burnt down to the garishly orange filter. That, too, reminds him of someone, someone who had been even more excited than he was to see the three Sand Siblings come ambling across the hills outside of Konohagakure proper but much worse at containing it. Shikamaru is sure the whole village had heard Naruto’s shout of the Kazekage’s name. 

The idea of Naruto and Lee fighting for Gaara’s hand briefly flickers across the front of Shikamaru’s mind, entertaining him for as long as it stays. 

“Wanna get something to eat?” he asks, instead of voicing the thought she might not find as amusing as he did, considering that’s her baby brother and all. Lee is a perfectly acceptable candidate, to Shikamaru’s standards, but Temari might not be so pleased with the idea of Naruto of all people coming to claim her brother’s hand. Being Kazekage is tricky enough without an orange idiot infesting your home and sleeping in your bed like some kind of particularly boisterous parasite. 

“Can’t,” she stretches her arms above her head, looking genuinely apologetic. “Promised Sakura and Ino I’d grab dinner with them before we go back to our lodgings for the night.” 

“But you came out here to sit with me before that, instead,” he says. 

“But I came out here to sit with you before instead, yeah.” There’s something genuinely playful in the backs of her ocean-dark eyes, which he thinks are awfully nautical for a desert-born-and-bred girl like Temari. Maybe it has something to do with an oasis. He’s read about those, but never seen one in person, obviously. 

(Ino would later tell him to get his head of his own ass and realize he had, idiot.) 

“Why?” he says, instead of saying any of the awfully cheesy lines not befitting a Nara genius flitting through his brain like so many wild butterflies right now. He’s got Chouji to blame for that, probably. Too much time spent cloud gazing together in the Akimichi butterfly house— well, before Shikamaru became de facto head of clan and shouldered the weight of the duties the title carried on his too-narrow shoulders, like a buckling suddenly sprouting a pair of ten-prong horns. 

It was hard to hold his head up now, just like that buckling. Everything moved so fast, and he was so tired, and he missed when he could sit at barbecue with his whole team and watch the afternoon drip by instead of laying awake all night wondering where the hell he went wrong and what the hell he was gonna do now. He missed when he didn’t have to worry if Kurenai was taking care of herself, when he didn’t stop at the memorial stone on his way to her house with meals he cooked but was never going to eat wrapped up and still warm under his arms, when his friends didn’t look so tired, so old, and when he hadn’t started smoking. 

But he’s on his last cigarette and thoughts like that are useless to him now, with Temari and her beauty mark and ocean-deep-dark eyes sitting next to him on the steps outside the Hokage building and the twilight slowly descending over the canopy. At least the canopy was healthy, with thick, waxy leaves in more hues of green than Shikamaru had ever wanted to know existed. 

Temari shrugs again. He’s reminded of Atlas, some ancient Greek metaphor his father had told him about once upon a time but never bothered to explain beyond the fact that he had been tasked with holding up the roof of the world as a punishment. Shikamaru wonders if he’s being punished, and where exactly he went wrong to deserve it. 

But life isn’t fair, so he grinds out the stub of his last cigarette where it’s burnt down to the orange filter into the stone of the steps and stores it in the carton to be thrown away later, when he inevitably goes to buy a new pack. 

“Just wanted to spend some time with someone who understands, I guess.” she says. Shikamaru understands that. He’s always been adept at reading between the lines even when his peers could barely read the kanji written so plainly on the face of the world for them to see. He sees the words hidden between the bars of kanji written across her face like a jail cell, hiding the truth beneath. He sees the scared little girl with too much on her shoulders and a whole world to protect hidden behind them, because a scared little boy with too much on his shoulders and a whole world to protect is staring back at her from behind his own. He sees it in the dark circles under her bloodshot eyes and the flyaways in her hair and shake of her fingers and the ink stains on the hems of her sleeves. He sees it in the way she took a drag off his last cigarette easy as breathing. He sees in it in her ocean-deep-dark eyes and her fox-cunning smile. He sees himself in her, and he’s not sure if he’s supposed to be afraid or entranced. 

So he stands up and the creak in his knees makes him think of Asuma and an empty bed and a memorial stone, and he extends his hand to Temari even though they both know she’s perfectly capable of standing up on her own. She stares at it for a second, looking at him like he’s about to drop her if she grabs on, let her fall to her ass on the cold hard stone and walk away laughing. 

“Thanks.” he says, hand still held out in waiting. She takes it, lacing their fingers together with an uncharacteristic methodicalness not necessary for just giving someone a hand up to their feet, and lets him pull her up. 

“What for?” she says. 

“For understanding.” 

If their hands linger a little too long before parting, that’s between them. 

If she passes him a fresh carton under the table as she passes his seat during next morning’s meeting on her way to stand guard behind her youngest brother’s, then that’s between him, her, and Asuma’s ghost.

**Author's Note:**

> i would like to thank my wonderful friend who got me into naruto in the first place, and the many wonderful conversations we’ve had about shikatema. this fic was born of the frankly disappointing dearth of good shikatema fics out there, and written in a matter of minutes for said friend to read.   
> as always, comments, con-crit, and questions welcome!


End file.
